


Corporate shenanigans

by Dovey



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Office, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 08:01:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15792387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dovey/pseuds/Dovey
Summary: it's an office au- until it isn't. Solving Sakura's habits is just a way to pass worktime boredom- until he gets some answers.





	Corporate shenanigans

Haruno Sakura is the most valuable employee in their department, and she knows it. 

It’s not because of her work record- though it’s exemplary, of course. She’s worked in accounting for a while, now, and caught more mistakes than anyone else. If they had an employee of a month plaque, it’d be her, every time, with the caption,  _ saved all our asses yet again when it came to the budget.  _ But that’s not what makes her special. There are lots of talented number crunchers in the world, after all, and Sakura’s not the best, just good. 

No, Sakura’s true value comes in her  _ connections.  _ She’s been in charge of party planning for the past two years, now, for their entire office, and she’s worked wonders that edge near miracles. She manages to throw a birthday party for Kakashi, despite how hard the boss works to hide such personal information as birth dates and favorite foods and dietary restrictions. She gives him a gluten free cake with caramel ice cream, and laughs at his wide-eyed look.  _ I’ve got my ways, Mr. Hatake,  _ she said, winked, and walked away. He ate the cake and the ice cream in a matter of minutes, and hid in his office the rest of the day. Everyone considered it a rousing success. 

She talked Naruto out of half his pranks, the ones that cost the company money or sent clients running. Naruto was friendly, excitable, and easily distracted. Whenever he seemed on the verge of a prank outbreak- something only a few of them could sense, and even fewer could pinpoint predict- Sakura would pull him aside and ask for help with planning a party. Someone needed to blow up the balloons. Hang the streamers. Naruto, this maternity leave party absolutely needs a poster with some artistic flair, do you think you could manage?

The other half of his pranks got suspiciously more well-planned. Days before he executes him, one could spot him whispering with Sakura on coffee breaks with shared side-splitting grins, or with a delighted smirk on his lips as he typed away text after text on his phone. His productivity is astounding, however, so these little acts of rebellion are happily ignored. (Much better than Jiriyia, their boss before Kakashi. The man had been fired for his particular officetime indulgences, and they’d all had to sit through an entire extra HR training session because of it, the bastard.) 

So when Uchiha Sasuke shows up- along with another three workers, all from a higher branch being put through remedial training to ‘remind them of their roots’- everyone waits with bated breath to see how exactly Sakura will finagle this particular boy into falling into line. To their shock, she doesn’t.

Well, she doesn’t  _ try.  _ She takes one look at him, gives a polite hello, and turns her attention to the three workers behind him, and sets to work on befriending them entirely. (Yamato trades gardening tips with her. Sai joins her and Ino’s gossip sessions, and talks her into going to art galleries with him. The third man takes one look at Kakashi and quits. Sakura shrugs this off rather easily- you can’t win them all, and if he can’t handle a little bit of crazy, he’s not meant for their office, after all.) 

The truth, that no one will know because Sakura is an absolute professional, is that she thinks he’s cute. More than objectively- because objectively, everyone in their office is unjustifiably pretty, and Hinata in particular could fit right in with some of the raunchier calendars Sakura has used over the years- but particularly. She takes that look at him, and she feels her heart rate pick up, because he’s got a pretty face and good taste in clothes and a smirk that feeds right into every inferiority complex she ever buried deep inside herself. 

She’s been to therapy for exactly these instincts, however, and she won’t let something as small as a bit of hormones and terrible socialization get in her way. She’s not ready to confront this particular issue, so instead, she ignores it. Him, really, but that’s not  _ her  _ fault. She focuses on the other new members of the office family. They fit right in, a perfect match for their environment, and Sasuke might be more famous than them- he is, after all, second in line for the company- but they’re all part of the family, and neither Sai nor Yamato sends her stomach into a swirling mess. 

To her immense displeasure, Sasuke proves difficult to avoid. (Naruto makes a game of it, with Ino. They keep count of how often they spot the man choosing socializing over avoidance, which Sai reassures them is entirely out of character.) He comes to her in person for help with his budgeting, instead of using email like most would. He stands near her at the birthday parties- parties that he showed no interest in attending, rather famously, before he was sent to this branch in particular. He takes his lunch break at the same time as her, and when he clocks out, he always gives a firm ‘goodnight’.  Her effort to keep away from him has inextricably brought his interest; the more she clamps down on the urge to respond to his inquiries, to feed into his presumably already far too large ego, the more he chases her approval. Something about this tells her that she’s likely not the only one who grew up with an inferiority complex, but still, she’s not about to give in so easily. 

She does well enough, up until the office christmas party. 

“I think I love you.” He tells her, and she cracks up laughing. God, but Naruto needs to stop spiking the punch at these things. 

“You don’t even know my name.” She tells him, fondly, and his eyes squint to peer at her.

“Sakura?” He says, and she pats him on the head. 

“That’s what people call me, yes.” She replies. “I’ve never said it was my name.”

He shows up at her cubicle the next day, her employee paperwork bursting out of his folder as he slaps it on her desk. “Sakura Haruno, right there.” 

“Mm, yes.” She says. He doesn’t like the look on her face. 

“Falsified?” He presses, and she shrugs. 

“Well, it’s certainly someone’s name.” She suggests. “Maybe it’s even mine. Names are tricky things, you know?”

Then she gets up to set about planning a meeting with some of Kakashi’s top clients, and Sasuke is left to try and puzzle things out on his own.

The thing about Sakura is, as seamlessly as she fits in their lives, no one knows much about hers. She’s got parents, still married, but no one knows anything else about them. She was teased as a small child for her forehead, apparently, and was prone to silly crushes as a tween- but beyond that, no one else could ever supply a detail. 

“Corporate spy?” He asks, one day, and she spits out her coffee with a cackle.

“You’ve never been more wrong.” She replies, then pauses. “But you’re also a little right.”

He doesn’t know what that means, and he’s desperate to find out. 

But despite his efforts- despite his investment of more time and resources than he’d care to admit, despite the extra hours he works to dig deeper, in the end, it’s Sakura who enlightens him as much as he’ll ever be on the matter. She knocks on his office door, a lovely sight in a simple suit, and there’s a folder in her hands that’s marked differently than any of the company records. She walks in when he gestures to give the okay, as if he’d ever turn her away when she’s proved far more interesting than half the deals he’s had to put together in the past five years of work.

She lays the folder onto his desk, and he opens it cautiously. 

There’s a pretty face, staring up at him. Bright pink hair, but the eyes are just like Sakura’s are now- green tinted things, shimmering with a clever bite to them. 

“Well, Sasuke?” She prompts. His eyes flip up and down, between her and the picture. 

Instead of a name, there’s the words,  _ Weapon X23. ‘Retired’,  _ stamped across that. He’d never noticed before, but Sakura’s teeth are just a little sharp. Like all of them are canines, and he’d simply never spotted it. Her tongue runs along each perfect, jagged spike, and he gulps. 

“I think… Sakura….is a very nice name.” He finally says. 

“Oh, I agree!” She clasps his hands, just a little too tight. “I think, now that that’s settled, you won’t need to worry so much about silly things. Digging around in an employee’s past might get you in trouble with HR, you know?” 

He gulps again, a dry swallow this time, and nods.

Sasuke does not press her for answers after that. When she brings a friend to the office one day, briefly- Gaara, she says, and his eyes are clear like glass and his teeth are like hers and his hair is obviously box-dyed red and his skin looks  _ wrong,  _ pebbled, but only because Sasuke is starring so close- he hides in his office until after closing. 

One day, Madara comes to the office, and takes a liking to Sakura. “Do you know if she’s single?” He asks, and then laughs. “Well, actually, that doesn’t matter so much. Do you know if she’d take a job up with corporate- I could use a PA who’s good with, uh, numbers.”

Sasuke looks at his uncle, and he thinks about a lot of things. He finally says, “Yes, I think she’d like that.”

A month after her transfer up, she returns to their branch, happy as a clam and with reunion gifts for all of them. “So terrible, what happened to your uncle.” She says when she sees Sasuke, clasps his hands with her own in a friendly greeting and hands him his present. They share a smile.

He’s scared of her, still, but he doesn’t mind this too much. She doesn’t seem the type to bite the hand that feeds her. “He has some friends, you know, who are grieving. I’m sure they’d love to hear from you.”

Her smile is all teeth. Sasuke feels his heart flutter at the sight. 

 

Their first date is a month later. 

**Author's Note:**

> i was trying to write an office au bc i love reading those for some reason and then it just....refused to stay that way. 
> 
> yes x23 is a reference to my favorite xmen. and yes sakura literally ate madara. gotta put those sharp chompers to use


End file.
